Knowing your right from your left (some political bubble gum)

Let’s just take a step back and make sure you can properly appreciate your left and your right.

Switch them around so you look at your left from your right and then your right from your left. If it helps go to a mirror. Take a picture. See how your face looks weird from the left if you look from the right and visa versa? See how that part in your hair that you think is on that side, is actually on the other side, because you’re used to seeing yourself in the mirror. Looks weird doesn’t it? Well guess what, that’s how people see you – that’s what you fucking look like!

This is the same for the political left and right. There can be a lot of animosity when you can’t fathom the other side, when you can’t see you from their point of view.

So let’s just sit back and appreciate what we see in our political opposites:

The Left:

The left is idealism. It dreams of utopia but it is also willing to make real moves towards such a utopia, sometimes radical and violent ones. The left is your pious idealistic teenage daughter reminding you why you need to recycle everything. She opens your eyes to injustice that you thought was ‘just the way things were done just because’ and shows you how it can be done differently.

The left doesn’t believe in the way things are, it believes in the way things should be and tries to make it happen. It is the good will that believes we can operate a bus service that is run for the community by the community without having to have a profit incentive. Such a simple and powerfully beautiful thing. Bellissimo!

What would we do without the left to push us to higher heights and remind us of our humanity, a humanity that, if it is to be humanity at all, must be at least sometimes above the all mighty dollar!

When it looks at a homeless person the left emphasises that person’s circumstances and position in society to explain how that person got there. It intellectualises what should be gut feeling. It thinks and second thinks instinct until it shows, what was seen by most as ‘natural’, as something base and ultimately wrong.

It is willing to uphold human rights to a self-deprecating level – to the point its own interests and even wellbeing is compromised and its resources are exhausted. It invites Syrian refugees to stay in our homes even if they send back salmon dinners, complain about the accommodation or even beat up our kids at school!

The Right:

The right basically pays for the lefts dreams…. ( : The instinct of the right is not dreamy, it is deadly practical. It doesn’t worry so much about how the goal is reached, or if anyone was being unfair while it was being reached, as long as the goal is reached.

It doesn’t seek to change the world to be more perfect, it seeks to merely succeed in the world the way it is. In fact it tends to like things just the way they are. The right wing in all of us, is more associated with the motivation to get things done – even if it is a left wing goal we want to get done. It is our drive. It is resolve. It is practical.

It tells us (it tells the left), no you can’t have that dream, because it costs too much. The right believes in relying on yourself, not on charity and certainly not on big government. When it looks at a homeless person the right emphasises that person’s abilities and characteristics to explain how that person got there. The right does not overextend itself in the defence of global principle or human rights – it protects its own first. It acknowledges and promotes instinctive reaction as natural and right. It tends not to overthink or intellectualise.

Look at that! Look at those two babes. What would we be without these, the left and the right. The left contemplates a better world and the right reminds it of what is practically possible. The right drives economies, wars, people with relentless determination, and in the process, puts people through the grinder if need be. While the left comes along to say wait stop this insanity, stop this capitalism stop this war stop this imperialism that results from your need to win, to make more money, (money used to implement the lefts utopia?! What? Just kidding (not really)).

Disclaimer: the characterisation of the political left and right may have no bearing on the actual left and right particularly where the terms of reference of left and right have to do with (1) far right wing and far left wing politics, societies and governments (particularly dictatorships) and/or (2) certain moral positions associated with the left and right such as religion, sex, abortion and, for readers joining us from the USA, guns. The terms of reference herein particularly refer to the politics of the left and right within liberal democratic societies especially of the so-called West.

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3 Comments

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